Across all sectors, industries, and geographies, demands continue for the electronic industry to provide products that are lighter, faster, smaller, multi-functional, more reliable, and more cost-effective. In order to meet these requirements of so many and varied consumers, more electrical circuits need to be more highly integrated to provide the functions demanded. Across virtually all applications, there continues to be growing demand for reducing size, increasing performance, and improving features of integrated circuits.
The seemingly endless requirements are no more visible than with products in our daily lives. Smaller and denser integrated circuits are required in many portable electronic products, such as cellular phones, portable computers, voice recorders, etc. as well as in many larger electronic systems, such as cars, planes, industrial control systems, etc.
As the demand grows for smaller electronic products with more features, manufacturers are seeking ways to include more features as well as reduce the size of the integrated circuits. However, increasing the density of integration in integrated circuits may be expensive and have technical limitations. Though technology continues its growth to once unimagined extents, practical limits of individual integrated circuits do exist.
Semiconductor package structures continue to advance toward miniaturization to increase the density of the components that are packaged therein while decreasing the sizes of the end products having the IC products. This is in response to continually increasing demands on information and communication apparatus for ever-reduced sizes, thicknesses, and costs, along with ever-increasing performance.
Different challenges arise from increased functionality integration and miniaturization. Miniaturization also includes the thinness or profile thickness of the integrated circuit package. Conventional approaches for very thin integrated circuit package have hit yield and reliability problems. For example, in the efforts to form very thin packages, integrated circuits may be exposed from the encapsulation. This leads to damage to the integrated circuit, such as chipping or cracking.
Designers and manufactures also march towards functional integration as another popular approach to achieve miniaturization. However, the functional integration approaches have their own drawbacks and limitations. Often devices performing different functions are not integrated into a single integrated circuit for a number of reasons, such as incompatible technologies or for lower cost. Conventional packaging of disparate devices results in packages having undesirably large form factor or size.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit package system providing low cost manufacturing, improved yield, device integration, and small form factor for the integrated circuits. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.